Cleaner Eating

Since I have been cutting out dairy and soy from my diet (for Lainey), it has been forcing me to eat healthier foods. And for that, I am thankful. It seems like most packaged or processed food contain dairy and/or soy. So I pretty much have to stick to basic ingredients, with some exceptions of course.

Also, Greg and I have really been trying to reduce our sugar intake. Not completely cut it out, but have less sugary snacks and less desserts. This has been hard for me. Greg is of course the most disciplined person ever so it seems like this stuff is easy for him. But I love love love sugar and it has been pretty miserable for me, ha! So I have been cheating some. BUT it does help that since I can't have dairy and soy (which basically eliminates baked goods) I can only cheat with a few things.

Ok let's start with breakfast. I LOVE milk and cereal. Love. Although I had gotten out of the habit of eating sugary cereal for breakfast when I was pregnant with Lainey and started having issues with blood sugar and feeling faint. There are some cereals that I still eat - Cheerios and a Honey Bunches of Oats type cereal, but I have them with almond milk and that is for "dessert". For breakfast I usually have oatmeal and an egg, and sometimes turkey bacon. Ok ok and sometimes pancakes on Saturdays but they are whole wheat and I try to use very little syrup so sue me.

Now onto lunch. Greg has been awesome and has been often grilling chicken or something else on Sundays for us to eat throughout the week. We'll eat it with sweet potatoes and vegetables a lot.

Snacks are hard. I used to eat a chocolate chip granola bar everyday (among other things). Now I eat a lot of almonds and cashews, fruit, banana peanut butter smoothies, and fruit strips (that are really supposed to be for Cambry) since they have no added sugar and I eat them for "dessert".

Dinners haven't changed too much. Although many of my favorite recipes contain cheese or other dairy products so I have been searching Pinterest for new recipes. It has been nice trying out new things lately.

A couple weeks ago at Divine Design we had a lesson on cooking vegetables. That was so helpful to me because I am pretty clueless at cooking vegetables. We mostly eat the same things over and over and a lot of times I just buy them frozen. I want to branch out but I don't know how to cook many vegetables. Since our lesson I have cooked cabbage (for the first time) and liked it. I also cooked fresh okra for the first time which was great too. And then last night I made zucchini fritters which were really good and Cambry even ate them. I still want to try out cooking greens (maybe kale or collard greens) although I don't like cooked spinach, only raw, so we'll see how that goes.

I still crave desserts all the time so thankfully I have found some dairy free soy free chocolate chips as well as dairy free soy free ice cream. Everything in moderation, right?